South African Woman Admits Treason Charge

November 4, 1986|By Los Angeles Times

JOHANNESBURG — A 28-year-old white woman pleaded guilty to treason charges here Monday, admitting that she had planted bombs at three South African police stations and had been trained as a guerrilla by the outlawed African National Congress. The woman, Marion M. Sparg, a former Johannesburg journalist who left the country in 1981 to join the African National Congress, said in a letter read into the court record that she had no regrets about her actions.

''I do not regret the commitment I have made,'' she wrote in an emotional letter to her parents shortly before her arrest last April. ''The struggle to get this country free is my life now. My life has meaning now.''

Sparg is to be sentenced later this week, and although treason carries the death penalty in South Africa, she is considered likely to be given only a lengthy prison sentence, perhaps 20 to 25 years. She also pleaded guilty to two charges of arson and one of attempted arson, stemming from the attacks on the police stations, and, in 1981, on neighborhood offices of the white opposition Progressive Federal Party.

Sparg, who had joined a small Marxist group here in the late 1970s, is the latest of a number of white radicals convicted of treason or terrorism for helping the African National Congress, the principal group fighting continued white minority rule.

Three other whites were convicted on treason or terrorism charges earlier this year: a Belgian woman, Helene Passtoors, 44, Eric Pelser, 21, and Stephen Marais, 29. Passtoors and Marais were convicted of smuggling explosives, Pelser confessed to being a guerrilla.